![]() These words all refer to a stony accretion of undigested materials taken from an animal’s gut and used as an antidote to poison. The English noun bezoar is derived from the Maghrebi Arabic bezuwār (possibly via the French bézoard) and thereby ultimately the Arabic bāzahr and Middle Persian pādzahr. By the same token, our very own language correction software called Antidote earned its name by providing the public with a ready remedy to common writing problems. Traheron’s English edition of de Vigo’s Most Excellent Workes of Chirurgerye (1543) therefore defines “Antidota” as literal physical “medicines to be receyued within the bodye”, while the Christian theologian Veron (1548) bills his writings as a spiritual “Antidotus or counterpoysen agaynst the teachings of the Anabaptistes”. English later followed suit, by borrowing and using antidote in both medical and metaphorical senses. When French in turn adopted the word as antidote, its usage notably included the figurative connotation of “a remedy” for non-medical emergencies, like moral or psychological problems. Latin borrowed the word as antidotum, and used it in the same sense. An antidoton was therefore a preparation administered to neutralize a poison or to combat a sickness. The Greek word antidoton literally means “something given against”, by adding the prefix anti- (“against”) to doton, the neuter past participle of didonai (“to give”). The roots of the English word antidote stretch back through French and Latin to Ancient Greek. ![]() In any case, the 25th anniversary of Antidote seems like a perfect time to explore the ways in which antidotes have fired the human imagination and enriched our language. Judging from the fact that Mithridates also famously took the time to learn all 22 languages of his kingdom, he would have loved the druidic magic of Antidote’s writing remedies too. ![]() Later Greek and Roman recipes based on his successes contributed to the emergence of medicinal science, but for Mithridates himself, the medicine was inseparable from the magic of his royal shamans. Take the “Poison King” Mithridates VI of Pontus, for example, who famously made himself immune to poisoning by systematically building a tolerance for every known poison, and mixing over 50 of them into a secret daily elixir. ![]() The history of antidotes and elixirs is a world where myth, magic, and medicine intermingle. ![]()
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